On Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel kicked off his opening monologue by addressing Trump’s beef with Mike Bloomberg, the Democratic candidate and actual billionaire.
“Trump is mixing it up with Michael Bloomberg now,” said Kimmel. “Bloomberg was not on the ballot in Iowa or New Hampshire—instead, he has like 15 commercials running on every show on every television channel, but that appears to be working. According to a new national poll, Bloomberg is now in third place behind Bernie and Biden.”
“But now he’s got a problem: A tape has surfaced from 2015 in which Mike Bloomberg touts his controversial stop-and-frisk policy,” he added. “This is a thing that targeted young black men.”
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Indeed, stop-and-frisk was a racist policy that primarily targeted people of color, leading to many dubious marijuana arrests and the ruination of thousands of lives. On the tape, which contained remarks Bloomberg made at the Aspen Institute in 2015, he says, “95 percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description and Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 15 to 25… That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city in America. And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed.”
He continued: “People say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana who are all minorities!’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why’d we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids’ hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them.”
The viral clip prompted Trump to tweet, “WOW, BLOOMBERG IS A TOTAL RACIST!” According to Kimmel, this “is ironic because, you know, some people think that the president might be a racist himself. Trump quickly deleted the post, which may have had something to do with the fact that he himself is a big fan of stop-and-frisk.”
The late-night host then threw to a clip of Trump on Fox News’ Hannity show saying, “I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to. We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well… In my opinion, I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk, in New York City, it was so incredible the way it works.”
“Oops!” offered Kimmel, adding, “By the way, stop-and-frisk is also Trump’s policy backstage at his beauty pageants, did you know that?” (Trump has been accused of ogling underage girls at his beauty pageants.)
